Speech Within Your Reach
If you manage a contact center, chances are good you have experience in offering some sort of self service to customers: an IVR, or a Web site with an FAQ list, perhaps. You know why self-service is good: It automates the basic issues customers have that may take up a large portion of your expensive live agents’ time, like balance inquiries and transfers for a bank, outage and billing information for a utility, store hours and stock availabilities for a retail store, price checks in the case of a b-to-b situation.
Touchtone IVR, for decades, was the default for customer self service. But the effectiveness of touchtone IVR had a limit. Customers (let’s face it) don’t much like traditional touchtone IVR, and never did. There’s the reason it’s the butt of so many jokes. It’s also highly inconvenient for an increasingly mobile customer base to hit tiny cell phone or smartphone buttons while driving or walking.
Enter speech-enabled customer self service. There is some evidence that customers actually like using speech for navigation and self service. There are no buttons to push, most systems allow “barge in” (so customers don’t have to wait for the end of a prompt), and speech systems are “smarter” and can allow for more ambiguous input, in the case of more advanced speech recognition.
At the debut of speech technologies for customer service, chances are, you ran into it only with airlines or large financial services companies, and there’s a reason for that: It was hideously expensive, required a team of IT personnel to maintain and administer, and needed a lot of space for hardware. So for years, it remained out of reach of most companies. In that respect, premises-based technologies can be a little bit like shopping at Costco — if you don’t have room for five gallons of mayonnaise in your pantry, and you’re not going to use 144 packets of peanut butter crackers before they go stale, then shopping there may not be for you.
Hosted delivery has been a blessing for small to medium-sized businesses for many reasons, but primarily because it has put technologies formerly out of the reach of all but the largest companies — speech and CRM, to name two obvious ones — into the hands (but off the shoulders) of smaller organizations.
For speech-enabled self service, hosting is ideal. Call centers can reap the significant benefits of speech in terms of both callrouting and offloading basic inquiries from agents and all the benefits associated with that, and bypass the large up-front costs and the not inconsiderable complexities of managing speech technology on the administrative side. Not to mention convert their ad hoc server farms back into the lunch rooms and supply closets they were supposed to be in the first place.
Is speech for you? Yes, if you run a contact center. How to get started?
Your first step is to attend a Webinar on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 2:00 pm EST entitled, “Deploying Speech Automation Using A Hosted Solution.” I will be moderating the event, and speakers will include individuals fromVoltDelta and Envox.
See you there!